You might remember a few months ago a game called Qui'Ifon (developer: ultim8p00) was posted about, which had some similarities to Cave Story. Since then, the engine has been reworked, its name has changed to The Undertaking and a new demo has been released, although apparently it was a rushed release so expect some bugs.

Author's description: "It's basically Cave Story meets swords meets Knytt (or Seiklus)." However, he also goes on to say that he wants to distance it from Cave Story.

Game itself's fairly cool so far, albeit a bit unpolished. The main menu's too slow in responding, though, and trying to shut the game down is a real nightmare. First got to go through that whole blurry intro thing again, and if you pressed spacebar to skip the introduction one time too many, the entire game starts again, instead of letting you choose "Quit", and you can start all over again in trying to shut it down. Ended up using Windows Task Manager, but that gave me such a hard time getting my screen's resolution back to something useful.

I quite liked the graphics, actually. Sure, they're a bit crude and the guy doesn't have arms, plus the jumping animation is less than basic, but it sets a good atmosphere and are nice to look at, plus it doesn't perform any stylebreaks. It's not like the character is a pixel sprite and the entire world is polygon-based. That's already more than quite a few games manage to do. It's utterly killed by the main menu and the inability to shut the game off, though.

I feel like it has made some definite improvements over the last demo build. There is a greater sense of atmosphere and the music feels much more dynamic and mixed with ambient sounds. The big problem with this build is the same as the last one; unskipable cutscenes. This one adds even adds a frustrating menu interface on top of that. But then again, for a rushed demo, it's pretty solid.